Evaluating offerwall traffic before you scale it

Evaluating offerwall traffic before you scale it

Offerwalls (Tapjoy, ironSource, AdGem) drive incentivized installs and event completions. They convert like crazy and retain like a sieve unless you filter hard.

✓ Excellent for early ranking pushes and event-volume goals
✓ Cheap cost-per-event
✗ Reward-motivated users complete the required event, then vanish — D7 retention often under 5%
✗ Heavy multi-app overlap; same device IDs across dozens of offers

Gate it: cap offerwall to a fixed share of installs, require a post-reward engagement event before counting the user as 'real', and exclude offerwall cohorts from your LTV models or they'll poison the average.

Use offerwalls as a tactical ranking lever, never as a retention or LTV channel — that's a category error a lot of teams make once.

Verdict: use for burst ranking, fence off from LTV modeling, cap the share.
Best for: app teams running launch or chart-ranking pushes.